September 22, 2012

Speeding Up The Confusion

When the federal government began providing billions of dollars in
incentives to push hospitals and physicians to use electronic medical
and billing records, the goal was not only to improve efficiency and
patient safety, but also to reduce health care costs.

But, in reality, the move to electronic health records may be contributing to billions of dollars in higher costs for Medicare,
private insurers and patients by making it easier for hospitals and
physicians to bill more for their services, whether or not they provide
additional care.

Ooops!

So what is going on? Well, on the one hand...

Some experts blame a substantial share of the higher payments on the
increasingly widespread use of electronic health record systems. Some of
these programs can automatically generate detailed patient histories,
or allow doctors to cut and paste the same examination findings for
multiple patients — a practice called cloning — with the click of a
button or the swipe of a finger on an iPad, making it appear that the
physicians conducted more thorough exams than, perhaps, they did.

Critics say the abuses are widespread. “It’s like doping and bicycling,”
said Dr. Donald W. Simborg, who was the chairman of federal panels
examining the potential for fraud with electronic systems. “Everybody
knows it’s going on.”

When Methodist Medical Center of Illinois in Peoria rolled out an
electronic records system in 2006, Dr. Alan Gravett, a former emergency
room physician, quickly expressed alarm.

He said the new system prompted doctors to click a box that indicated a
thorough review of patients’ symptoms had taken place, even though the
exams were rarely performed, while another function let doctors pull
exam findings “from thin air” and include them in patients’ records.

But on the other hand...

Many hospitals and doctors say that the new systems allow them to better
document the care they provide, justifying the higher payments they are
receiving. Many doctors and hospitals were actually underbilling before
they began keeping electronic records, said Dr. David J. Brailer, an
early federal proponent of digitizing records and an official in the
George W. Bush administration. But Dr. Brailer, who invests in health
care companies, acknowledged that the use of electronic records “makes
it faster and easier to be fraudulent.”

I will guess that Medicare does not cast the same keen eye on doctor's bills as the evil private insurers.

TrackBack

Comments

Nobody's mentioned the possibility of the records getting hacked; gee nobody would do that::eyeroll::. I knew that the purported benefits of electronic medical records were a pie in the sky crock when so many imbeciles in academia were shilling for them.

Unexpectedly but nothing new for Obummy's administration we now have a snafu in the billing part of Obambicare Everything with Obama'a fingerprints on it turns to dust. He's the opposite of Rumpelstilskin.

The underlying problem here is not just Obamacare, it's third-party payer. My mechanic has computerized records, and in theory could probably pull these kinds of tricks, but I know what's being done on my own car, I can see what's been billed, and I'm responsible for paying so I scrutinize it.

Would charging for nonexistent medical exams work quite so well if the check to cover them was written by the person on whom they were supposedly performed?

Also, it feels strange to accuse Obama of inviting widespread medical fraud a few days after my first stab at an Obama impression included the line about doctors, amputations, and boat payments - a reference to the time Obama accused the medical profession of widespread fraud, to howls of derision from myself.

Yes indeed if you want to truly control health care costs, go to a catastrophic insurance system couple with a Health Savings Account and make it tax free if funds build up after a period of time to an amount in excess of the threshold for the catastrophic insurance to kick in. Now there is a real financial incentive on a health care consumers part to scrutinize and question every item on the bill. Behavior would change over night for most, the dimbulbs might require a month or so to catch on.

Gonzo, I believe everything you say is true and I didn't mean to imply otherwise. My comment was that government was at the very least somewhat hasty to implement it before the implications were thought out.

When Obama stated there was $60 Billion/year in medicare fraud, that should have been the tipoff. This sounds tailor made for Russian computer fraudsters or jihadi hackers to tunnel into aside from the usual fraudsters and crooks.

Unless there is someone going over every line item like my wife does, then it's an invitation to collapse.

It sounded like a great idea when Nancy and Harry and Barry were chooming it up on the White House hookah, but since no one even read the damned bill in the first place, what the heck else did they expect.

It's interesting...just a few days ago I read an article online that stated with the advent of electronic patient records, health care has improved immensely because doctors have total access to a patient's health care records. Everything was positive about doctors carrying their little electronic devices around with them. Call me simple but I never thought that their little brains would be whirling with thoughts of how they could cut and paste and bill more instead of how big my tumor had grown. :)Silly me.

We lived in London over 12 years and never used National Health Care one time. We always used private doctors. The few times I was in a NHS hospital to visit friends, the places creeped me out. They never seemed clean, and I hated the wards. Also, people were assigned to doctors, instead of choosing like I could. Didn't like the thought of that...now our insurance companies herd us into systems like that. Oh, well. Progress.

"Listen squirt, abstract art is supposed to be ugly. Don't you know anything? It's some French idea that you make ugly stuff and nobody understands it, but then people feel too foolish to say they don't understand it so they say it's art."

OT, In the sort of successor to Dibdin's Aurelio Zen series, which frankly I found the BBC series more interesting, I have this offering from the Irish writer Conor Fitzgerald, disregard the first review, it concerns an organized crime investigation that extends itself to Germany and back again, and the dialogue between the persnickety German investigator, to which there is a method to his madness, and the protagonist, an American born police spector, is interesting;

This wouldn't be everyone's list, but there is a lot of truth to it. I might even include Trump. Some of the edgier out-there people are who get the ball rolling.
The clean toga crowd never get the ball rolling....

We've got eight Harriers destroyed and a lost war in Afghanistan, Iran on the verge of a nuke, the rest of the ME in flames or in the hands of jihaists, our ambassador in Libya assassinated and apparently a rescue mission ambushed in the desert along with a resurgent Russia mucking things up.

Barry's foreign policy is not only eerily similar to Jimmy Carter's but seems to me a bigger disaster. The only thing missing is some hostages.

I was selling raffle tickets today for Rotary when a woman came up to me and stated ranting about Obama. I was a little taken aback. A few minutes into the rant she told me she recognized me from TV. I was more taken aback. She was willing to do anything to make sure Mitt wins, but had absolutely no idea that people could volunteer to help. I couldn't get any more aback at that point.

On Twitter some idiot keeps tweeting me to stop watching Fox news so I can realize how great Obama is.

Realizing how well loved the Kathy Griffin harpy is here at JOM, thought I'd share this lovely shot of her on a fine fall Saturday..........
sorry, took a few seconds to get over the dry heaves but I'm back now.

It's time to take Obama & Hillary & Progressivism & paint them as the giant LOSERS that they are. Those 2 groveling on Pakistani TV should be shown & then just add this question...Who wants to follow these 2 losers? Apologize for free speech? Never!

It is disturbing that if we want to know what the heck is going on around the planet involving our forces and the MidEast, the 2 place's we can't go to find that information is to our Press or to our Administration.

We have to go to Blogs like yours, to Michael Yon, to the UK Newspapers, perhaps to Al Jazirah. But as for trying to get any honest answers from our Administration or our Domestic Press, forget about it.

Another point. Recalling from personal observation how strongly Al Jazirah ran with the DNC Voice Vote fiasco, I wonder what their coverage will be now if they start broadcasting, in a similar manner, the White House's slow retraction that it was all about the Video.

Seems to me that with the $70,000 Pakistan Ad, and with the continual recitation for a week of that lame video story, that the White House has effectively painted themselves into a corner and can't honestly broadcast that it wasn't the video, due to the risk of making themselves look like flip-flopping hypocrites to the Arab street via Al Jazirah.

My guess then is that there will be very little further acknowledgement of any retraction of their bogus story. I think they will continue to damn the Videotape on the one hand and essentially not make any unequivocal comments of their reversal of position that would be suitable for Al Jazirah soundbites. Instead they will have Jay Carney blather on indistinctly and just wait for the PressCorps to ignore their lie and move on to other topics.

Two encounters at the Arlington event today...
1. a guy got his kids some GOP balloons. 2 red balloons with elephants on them & a bit later the wife came up & took the balloons away from the kids & gave them back.
She angrily fussed at the husband who looked clueless & they walked on.

2. a guy stops me to get a Romney/Ryan bumper sticker & the wife turns & curses at me (f'n something...I couldn't make it out). The husband just rolled his eyes & apologized.

Dem. men are beaten down by their women. It seems like it's the women that are so rabid.

Would Romney even need to embellish that Obama and Hillary commercial?

In the ad, Obama is seen talking about America’s tradition of religious tolerance and Clinton is seen saying that the U.S. government had nothing to do with the video that contains vulgar depiction of the Prophet Muhammad.

“We absolutely reject its content and message,” Clinton says in the advertisement.

A caption on the ad reads: “Paid Content” and it ends with the seal of the American Embassy in Islamabad,

DC crowd: Coming up on the 14th of October for an internment in Arlington NC on the 15th. Great guy and one hell'ava engineer. Was a young Airborne in WW2 but it ended before he could see any action. Staying with daughter in Darnestown but have to leave back to Florida on Tuesday morning. Don't know how much time I'll have to meet up.

Dear all, greetings from the south of France. Taking a well earned vaca to a place where the weather is fantastic and the food better. After a day at the coast -- yes Ig there were a number of topless sunbathers, and they were worthy subjects, my wife claimed to have missed seeing them-- off to Provence tomorrow to hike some hills and taste some wine. If there ar any interesting developments I'll comment, i'm afraid my travelogues won' t be nearly as interesting or informative as Daddy's.

Don't miss Hair on fire (HOF) time:
IBM article for the Monday Special puts it in a timeline: Huma Mahmood Abedin is mentioned but thankfully no photos of her and Hillary! together.
LUN
It's gag me with a ladle time.

Well it's curious, because as even Maraniss has discovered, every account by Obama, actually has a much more 'nuanced' real life version. Hussein Onyongo, for instance, was much more appreciative
of the West, than we were given to believe, Klein,
revealed that Remnick's 'many innocent trees' that were sacrificed to build 'the Bridge'. The role of Frank Davis, who's influence is very much present
in Obama's thinking, along with De Unger, who helped conceptualize those impressions.

As I pointed out, earlier, Frau, Abedin and Pandith, likely had a grand old time, fooling
Hillary into believing she was actually celebrating Eid Al Fitr, specially in light of what had happened the previous day.

I don't know how to post photos and in the case of cote d'azur sunbathers it would be irrelevant. My wife adheres to a look but don't make a complete idiot out of yourself philosophy, so photos are not gonna happen.

I just had a call from the republican party to get me to donate money. The women kept talking about how dire things are the how they need to plan their budget. SHe then asked me if she could put me down for $500.00. I told her I would give as I always have, online in an amount I could afford. She said she understood,she would put me down for $250.00.

I said, "no" I would donate when I could and what I could. So she said she would send me an envelope for $100 and hoped I would give more.

I told her again, I would give what I could on line. So she said - I'll send you an email for a $50 pledge.

I told her not to send me anything and she said she would put me down for $25.00. I said, "I don't like your tactics, as I said I will donate what I can."

And she said:

"Fine! We are going to lose this election."

My response: "You shouldn't have this job and I hope this call is recorded."

She is the kind of person who could get a person to change who they vote for.

Overall it's much simpler to just stop watching the media. They don't know any more than you. They just read the same sources you could read and then retell the story on camera. Read it for yourself. That's what a citizen would do.

Jane, political solicitors always give you a song and dance about needing a pledge right now. I always tell them I don't respond to ANY telephone solicitations and never contribute over the phone. Then I hang up.